Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society

PART I

INTRODUCTION

1

MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTRUCTION

No actual class formation in history is any truer or more real than any other, and class defines itself as, in fact, it eventuates. Class, as it eventuated within nineteenth-century industrial capitalist societies, and as it then left its imprint upon the heuristic category of class, has in fact no claim to universality.

—E. P. THOMPSON, Eighteenth-Century English Society

Performing a Marriage

The wedding took place during the spring of 1991 on the ground floor of a half-completed concrete home among the seemingly haphazard thickets of similar homes that make up many of Kathmandu’s sprawling middle-class suburbs. Above, laundry fluttered like Tibetan prayer flags from clotheslines attached to the dozens of twisted steel rods sprouting through the roof from the building’s reinforced concrete pillars. Stretching into thin air, anxious for the day when there would be enough money to add another story, the metal rods seemed to mimic the family’s uneasy straining to maintain the standards of a local middle-class lifestyle and testify to their part in the ongoing social drama of middle-class construction.

Having been invited by a Nepali friend (a relative of the bride), I felt privileged to witness the intricacies of an orthodox Hindu wedding and was sure it would be a traditional and authentic event. Yet before long my happy reverie was shattered by the clamorous arrival of a local video camera crew. As the only Westerner in attendance, I felt somehow personally responsible every time the cameramen—to me the embodiments of an intrusive, alien modernity—held up the proceedings: interrupting the Brahman priest’s chanting, clumsily rearranging the wedding party, shining bright lights onto the already distraught bride, and entangling everyone in light and microphone cords. I was feeling terribly sorry for the group of dignified women seated to one side—who seemed to be enduring the almost slapstick proceedings with stoic resignation—until suddenly an elderly grandmother tottered to her feet shouting instructions to the wedding party and cameramen to essentially Redo that last bit!

In many ways this wedding story is an allegory of life in and for Kathmandu’s middle class. The wedding served as a stage on which to perform middle-class culture, a culture that labors to produce itself out of the seemingly contradictory resources of tradition and modernity. The awkward dance of the priest, wedding party, and camera crew is a miniature version of the dance of the middle class in Kathmandu, a dance that brings together a host of competing cultural assets, consumer demands, and media influences into a performance of cultural life that is by its nature complex, halting, unstable, and in periodic need of redoing! It is this sense of middle-class culture as practice, production, or performance—along with the anxieties that accompany any act of creation—that I aim to convey in this book. Like the unfinished home where the wedding took place, class culture is always a work-in-progress, a perpetual social construction that is as fundamentally bound to the concrete of economic resources as it is to the cultural practices of people who jointly negotiate their social identities.

Although the bride and groom were part of a cultural production shared with their elderly grandparents, the two parties were born on either side of a fundamental turning point in modern Nepali history. In 1951 a popular democratic movement (inspired by the Indian independence movement) put an end to a century of isolationist rule in Nepal. The decades since have seen the Kathmandu valley suddenly awash in a tidal wave of transnational political, economic, and cultural currents that have brought new ideas, new technologies, and ultimately, new ways of being. This book traces some of the sociocultural consequences of Kathmandu’s opening to the world. It documents ways in which ever-expanding frames of cultural reference, and spheres of cultural influence, have transformed the lives of people in an ostensibly remote and isolated place.

People in Kathmandu are powerfully aware of living in a radically new era. Whereas the grandparents (and even parents) in this wedding story grew up at a time when communications with the world outside the Kathmandu valley required weeks of grueling overland travel, the bride and groom grew up watching global media events like the Gulf War and the World Cup live on television. People born since 1951 have witnessed the world arriving along the first motorable roads into the valley; through telephones and now satellite telecommunications; through electronic entertainment media (cinema, television, video, satellite TV); via air transportation, mass tourism, and a surge of global commodity imports; and through the logics of a new bureaucratic state apparatus, party politics, and large-scale foreign development aid. Technological and social developments that took place over the course of centuries in many parts of the world have in Nepal arrived in the space of the past five decades, and in particular, the last twenty-five years.¹

In Kathmandu the past and present stand in extraordinarily stark contrast in almost every aspect of daily experience. Seen from the air, Kathmandu resembles a fried egg (map 1): a distinct center marks the old city (once surrounded by a wall), with its densely packed traditional architecture, while the sprawling ring of unplanned post-1950s development—rich farmland now covered by commercial districts and middle-class suburbs—stands as testimony to new movements of goods, capital, people, and cultural sensibilities. Similarly, for many urban Nepalis, core social and religious values (often manifest in terms of caste and kin affiliations) are engulfed—and sometimes overwhelmed—by a transformed sociocultural context adrift in new transnational currents: new labor and economic relations, a new universe of material goods, new arenas of public display, and new ideologies of education, progress, and modernity. As Kathmandu residents navigate through a range of built environments with vastly different histories, so also must they negotiate a range of competing and coexisting systems of value and meaning. In Kathmandu the meaning and experience of modernity lies in daily balancing the demands and possibilities of a transforming social and material context against those of a deeply rooted cultural milieu of moral values, systems of prestige, and notions of propriety.

This book has three goals: to describe the cultural contexts and historical processes out of which a new middle-class culture has emerged in Kathmandu; to provide a detailed account of the practices that make up contemporary urban middle-class life; and, drawing on these ethnographic insights, to offer a new approach to conceptualizing middle-class culture. This book argues that class best accounts for the new sociocultural patterns that have come to dominate urban life in Kathmandu. Caste, kinship, and ethnicity continue to powerfully inflect sociocultural experience, but the daily lives of people in Kathmandu demonstrate that the epistemological styles (Appadurai 1990b) of social life have shifted, leaving class as the framing principle for everyday experience. Within this emerging class society, this study focuses on the local middle class, those people carving out a new cultural space which they explicitly locate, in language and material practice, between their class others above and below.

1. Middle-class suburban sprawl encroaching on open lands in Kathmandu’s Sankhamul area

In this chapter I introduce some of the study’s ethnographic contexts but focus mainly on sketching out the theoretical frame that I will use to make sense of the middle-class cultural life that I describe. This requires an excursion into the politically charged debates over class and cultural practice, debates which reach some of their most arcane and acrimonious levels when trying to theorize the middle class. Drawing from both Marxian and Weberian traditions, this study charts a path toward an anthropology of middle-class culture in Nepal, and elsewhere.

This approach to middle-class culture explicitly incorporates cultural processes of consumption (notably including the consumption of mass media), and the production of youth culture. Class, consumption, media, and youth have all been subjects of anthropological study, but usually in isolation or in pairs: youth and media (Fuglesang 1994), class and consumption (Bourdieu 1984), media and class (Mankekar 1999), youth and consumption (Nava 1992, Sato 1991), and so on. Combining and building on the key insights provided by each of these studies (and many others), this book argues that class, consumption, media, and youth must be seen as not merely interactive but mutually constitutive cultural processes. In Kathmandu a burgeoning local consumer culture, the growing power of a mass-mediated popular imagination, and the recent emergence of youth as a distinct social category are, I suggest, best understood within the context of middle-class cultural life. Cultures of consumerism, media, and youth are not side effects or consequences of middle-class formation. Rather, they are among the most important cultural processes through which an emerging middle class actually creates itself as a sociocultural entity.

Over the past few decades in Kathmandu, an almost entirely new intermediate social stratum has emerged in the social gap between historically polarized national elites and urban commoners.² In the process, members of this middle class have had to construct entirely new forms of cultural practice. This book ethnographically documents the struggles—moral, material, and ideological—that an emerging middle class must undertake to produce a new cultural space where none had been before. The middle class occupies a precarious position along two continua. On the one hand, it is shaped by its self-conscious awareness of its position between high and low classes. On the other, it is forced to pioneer a space for Nepali national identity somewhere between the global ideological poles of tradition and modernity. People in Kathmandu’s middle class are members (and often leaders) of a state with massive ideological and financial stakes in an international economy of development aid.³ Yet it is their position on the receiving end of a global development apparatus that defines its targets as undeveloped or traditional (Pigg 1992, Escobar 1995) that forces Kathmandu’s middle class into the dilemma of reconciling their status as modernity’s traditional other with their desires to claim a legitimate place within modernity. Indeed, a great deal of the cultural work described in this book—the work of creating a new middle-class cultural space through processes of consumption, mass mediation, and youth culture—is part of the perhaps impossible project of transforming the idea of Nepali modernity from its condition as oxymoron in a global capitalist political economy of places into a legitimate reality in local cultural life.⁴

Mirroring the organization of the book itself, the rest of this chapter introduces class, consumption, media, and youth.

CLASS AND CULTURE

Why Class?

Kathmandu might seem an odd choice for a study of class cultural dynamics. Indeed, not long ago a prominent British anthropologist argued in print that classes do not exist in Nepal and that caste is the only principle of social organization at work (Macfarlane 1994:114–15). While caste remains a strongly determining and self-orienting cultural force, this book shows that in the last decades people in Kathmandu have come to live more and more of their lives in contexts oriented around the social logic of class. From a series of detailed ethnographic perspectives, this book shows that class has increasingly come to be the framing paradigm for many people in Kathmandu, encompassing (though by no means eliminating) the social valence of caste. As more and more of everyday life revolves around the social imperatives of the money/market economy, the moral (and economic) logic of caste is subordinated to the economic (and moral) logic of class.

When writing about class, one has two basic options: either treat class as a given—a taken-for-granted, natural, universal category or concept that speaks for itself—or attempt to actually explain the word by describing the experience of class in everyday life. It is the latter option, the effort to understand class as cultural life, that poses a challenge to anthropology. But once we take up the challenge of constructing an anthropology of class, we are confronted with a range of problems. First, such an anthropology has to counter the claims that class does not exist, or that even if it did at one time, the late-twentieth-century triumph of the global capitalist order and its freedoms has made it a moot point. Yet even if we turn our backs on these neoliberal naysayers and side with the true believers, we are often not much farther along in the quest for an anthropology of class. The large social-science literature on class, in which the concept is far more often used than defined, leaves us the daunting task of actually describing and analyzing the relationship between class and culture. Ironically, an anthropology of class has to confront both the myths of classlessness and of class; that is, it has to challenge those who deny the existence of class, even while it attempts to rescue the concept from its static state in social theory.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

There are many reasons why students of anthropology should be interested in class. Surely one of anthropology’s fundamental challenges as it begins a new century is to come to terms—theoretically, methodologically, existentially—with the fact that the other we study is as modern, or as embedded in conditions of modernity, as we are (Marcus 1990:5). Indeed, this book will argue that the conditions of modernity are even more glaringly prominent on the Third World periphery, in places like Kathmandu, where they stand starkly outlined against memories of earlier, suddenly traditional, ways of being. Processes of urbanization, market penetration, bureaucratization, industrialization, and class formation play themselves out in ever-changing power relations that bring the local and global together in explosive and unpredictable ways. With fully half of the world’s population now living in urban areas increasingly integrated into a world capitalist economy (D. Harvey 1996:403), the complex processes of social life encapsulated in the domains of class relations and practices are realities that anthropologists must confront.

That anthropologists have mainly shied away from the study of class is due only in part to their discipline’s traditional subject matter. Non-Western, premodern, simple societies were thought to operate around principles of social organization other than class, but then, so were the Western societies that anthropologists called home.⁵ Particularly in the United States—an insistently classless society in which the vast majority of people self-identify as middle class (Roberts 1997)—the idea that class (with all of its uncomfortable implications of conflict and inequality) might have something to do with our everyday life verges on the antisocial and unpatriotic. In the United States, we the people have always been imagined as a classless collectivity in which social inequality must be ideologically subsumed into one country, indivisible.

But the we of we the people has also always been an imperfect reflection of the nation, and it is precisely the myth of the people—and the nation’s others that such a myth produces—that lays open the myth of classlessness. From its very beginnings, America’s classless society has been precariously maintained through the exploitation of human and natural peripheries. Superabundant North American natural resources (exploited in largely nonsustainable ways) provided an extractive frontier that opened the way for social mobility and the vast accumulation of wealth. Over the centuries, slavery, steady influxes of vulnerable immigrant populations, and, more recently, highly productive migrant-labor populations (often criminalized and therefore easily exploitable) have all served as a kind of shifting human extractive frontier (hidden within the nation) that has helped make possible the classless middle-class American lifestyle. Finally, late-capitalist economic globalization has only helped bolster the North American experience of classlessness through a series of new regional and global free trade regimes (North American Free Trade Association [NAFTA], World Trade Organization [WTO], etc.) that ever more effectively exile our class others out of sight and out of mind.⁶ When the Zapatistas of Mexico’s Chiapas region timed the launch of their armed peasant rebellion to coincide with the implementation of the NAFTA agreement on 1 January 1994, they gave clear indication that transnational class antagonisms were alive and well in the new world order in spite of the First World’s happy, classless rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and competitive advantage (N. Harvey 1998:181–82). Middle-class Americans, including anthropologists, may project their imagined classless society onto an ideal world of free trade and democracy, but it is a depoliticizing, disempowering myth that finds increasingly fewer takers (Shiva 2000, Escobar 1995, N. Harvey 1998, etc.).

This study of class cultural practice in Nepal does not address the overtly antagonistic, potentially explosive relations between new Third World working classes and transnational capital that some anthropologists have studied (Ferguson 1994, Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983, Ong 1987, Weyland 1993). Although it draws from and relates to these and many other studies, this book’s theoretical and ethnographic focus is elsewhere. Rather than addressing class theory in general, this book contributes to the specific task of conceptualizing middle-class cultural practice. Focusing on the middle class, to the relative exclusion of other class formations with and against which the middle class exists, is not simply a capricious act on my part. Characterizing the middle class as a social and cultural entity has always presented a distinct challenge to class theorists. It is the middle class’s extraordinarily complex culture—with its myriad forms of competing cultural capital, its ambiguous and anxiety-inducing relationship with the capitalist market, its intricate systems of dissimulation (whereby it hides its class privilege in everyday practice)—along with its increasingly dominant role in cultural process worldwide, that makes it an important and timely subject of anthropological inquiry. Understanding local middle-class cultural processes in world context is no less important than understanding the relations between transnational labor and capital. What is more, understanding the cultural politics of middleness in Kathmandu—a place where a new cultural middle ground is still being pioneered, its structures and fault lines not yet obscured by the sediments of time—may shed light on the class-cultural politics of denial whereby we perpetuate our own myth of classlessness.

The Embarrassment of the Middle Classes

Despite the fact that class has a long and illustrious pedigree in social theory—and is arguably one of modern social science’s foundational ideas—it remains an exceedingly difficult concept to pin down. From the very beginnings of modern social science, class has been a category more often invoked than actually theorized. Even Karl Marx and Max Weber, the two seminal theorists of modern capitalist society, never fleshed out systematic, comprehensive theories of class.⁷ Although Marx and Weber are often represented as opposing theorists, in what writings they did leave on the issue of class, the two are not as far apart as one might suppose. In the last decades neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian class theorists have narrowed the gap even further (Burris 1987:67). Whether this melding represents the Marxianizing of Weberian theory (Wright 1997:34) or the fall of Marxist theory to the Weberian temptation (Sitton 1996:36)⁸ is not the issue here. What is clear is that the strengths of each theoretical tradition have proven to be, at least in part, complementary.

Nowhere has the convergence between Marxian and Weberian class theory been more pronounced than in efforts to theorize the middle class. Marx’s failure to anticipate the twentieth-century expansion of middle classes in advanced capitalist societies has been a source of ongoing theoretical crisis for Marxist theorists (Sitton 1996:17). The embarrassment of the middle classes (Wright 1985:13) has been the Achilles heel of Marxist class theory. It is no coincidence that Weber’s response to Marx’s writings on class consists mainly of an elaboration on sociocultural processes within what Weber referred to as the intermediate strata or middle classes. Since that time, Marxists have drawn heavily upon Weberian concepts in their effort to adapt classical Marxism to the conditions of late twentieth-century capitalism (Burris 1987:67). An anthropology of middle-class cultural practice needs to unite a Weberian sensitivity to the powerful role of culture in social life with a Marxian commitment to locate different forms of cultural practice in the context of unequal distributions of power and resources in society.⁹

One way to begin this kind of reconciliation is to view Marx and Weber in light of the different historical moments, class experiences, and political concerns that each addressed. In the context of mid-nineteenth-century labor exploitation, unrest, and mobilization, Marx stressed the material underpinnings of class and the historical dynamic of conflict between workers and capitalists. Underdeveloped in Marx’s work is an appreciation for the constitutive role of culture in the production and maintenance of class power¹⁰ and a concern for the nature of cultural life within class groups.¹¹ Marx recognized the link between economic status and ideology; he saw that class privilege produced a privileged (and privileging) ideology. But he did not appreciate how important a role the very cultures of social privilege played in actually producing and reproducing the material reality of economic power.

By the early twentieth century, overt struggles between labor and capital had begun to wane, the European and American middle classes were growing rapidly, and a new mass-production-based consumer society had dawned.¹² Much of Weber’s class theory describes the sociocultural conditions of those people I will call middle-class, even though Weber himself insisted on using only the terms middle classes and intermediate strata,¹³ apparently as a way of registering his opposition to the Marxist practice of collapsing groups of people into class categories based only on their material relations. Although I affirm Weber’s contention that the reality of socioeconomic life is much more complex than the materialist class theory of his day could accommodate, I believe it is possible to construct a theory of middle-class cultural practice that acknowledges Weber’s concerns for sociocultural complexity while at the same time envisioning a shared sphere of class practice. In this book I will argue that Weber’s intermediate groups are not just a series of strata or stratified classes but a middle class, characterized by a set of class-specific sociocultural processes that Weber himself was among the first to describe.

Weber’s writings on class help to correct some of the economic reductionism of the Marxian tradition by introducing what anthropologists would recognize as culture into the equation of socioeconomic power. Weber’s main qualification of Marxist class theory is his insistence that class position (economic power) is distinct from—though often tied to—social status (honor or prestige). Weber observed that social status is very frequently related to class position but is not . . . determined by this alone (Weber 1947:428). Class, for Weber, was a function of a person or group’s position in the capitalist market, both in terms of relations of production (capitalist or laborer) and in terms of ability to consume goods and services in the market. Social status on the other hand had to do with a person or group’s lifestyle; education, training, and socialization; and inherited or occupational prestige. With a critique of Marx in mind, Weber wrote,

In contrast to the purely economically determined class situation we wish to designate as status situation every typical component of the life fate of men that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor. This honor may be connected with any quality shared by a plurality, and, of course, it can be knit to a class situation: class distinctions are linked in the most varied ways with status distinctions. Property as such is not always recognized as a status qualification, but in the long run is, and with extraordinary regularity. (Weber 1946:186–87)

Weber never explicitly laid out a mechanism that theorized these links between social status and class situation. Yet by acknowledging that class and status are knit together with extraordinary regularity, Weber affirmed Marx’s equation of property and power, even while insisting that economic dominance is always culturally mediated in patterns of socialization, lifestyles, and discourses of honor and prestige.¹⁴ In effect, Weber maintains that even while power is almost always rooted in economic privilege, it is also always exercised and reproduced culturally. Weber’s distinction between class and status helped foreground the role of culture (lifestyle, education, material culture, and so on) in class practice, but by focusing mainly on sociocultural dynamics within middle-class groups (a politics of competing status claims), Weber and his followers typically downplay Marxist concerns for ways in which access to economic resources structures relations between classes.¹⁵

This difference between Marx and Weber reflects at least in part the fact that by the time Weber appeared on the European scene a very different class dynamic had emerged, one in which a new abundance of mass-produced consumer goods was beginning to defuse earlier forms of overtly class-based politics by opening up a space for a new middle class. The new middle class did not own the means of production (productive assets like factories or plantations), but its members were offered access to other forms of property: consumer goods, autos, even private homes. The growth of this new middle class reflected both the rapidly increasing bureaucratic, service, and professional labor sectors, and the ability of the new consumer economy to absorb large portions of the old working classes into the middle class by encouraging them to construct their social identities more around the goods and property they owned than the kind of work they did (cf. Halle 1984).¹⁶ Many social historians have documented this shift in social identification from you are what you do to you are what you have (e.g., Susman 1984, Lears 1983), but it is perhaps less often noted that the same shift also charts the move, in Western societies, away from a politics of interclass antagonism (analyzed by Marx) toward an increasingly dominant middle-class ethos of intraclass status competition (analyzed by Weber).

The growing cultural and political dominance of the European and American middle classes in the early twentieth century—the embourgeoisement of mainstream society—has long been the subject of critical commentary.¹⁷ My own concern is with how emerging middle classes construct themselves as cultural entities, how their cultural life essentially depoliticizes social life (or hides middle-class privilege behind screens of seemingly natural cultural practice in the realms of status), and what insights we can glean from social theorists like Marx and Weber into the cultural politics and practices of middle-classness in other times and places. Drawing on Weber (and other theorists within the Weberian tradition), this book portrays the middle class in Nepal as a domain of internally competing cultural strategies, systems of prestige (status), and forms of capital that are not, strictly speaking, economic (Bourdieu 1985). But, I will argue, this internal cultural dynamic is always also part of a middle-class project to construct itself in opposition to its class others, above and below. The middle class is fundamentally situated in a larger class economy in which power and resources are unevenly distributed. This book constantly returns to Marxian concern for the cultural politics of ruling ideas, or how the cultural practices of the middle class disguise its class privileges (its economic and political powers) behind seemingly noneconomic rhetorics of honor, achievement, and so on. In this book the middle class emerges as a never-ending cultural project that is simultaneously at odds with itself and with its class others. The middle class is a constantly renegotiated cultural space—a space of ideas, values, goods, practices, and embodied behaviors—in which the terms of inclusion and exclusion are endlessly tested, negotiated, and affirmed. From this point of view, it is the process, not the product, that constitutes class.

Middle-Class Cultural Practice

Whereas Marx paid scant attention to the role or nature of middle classes (Bottomore 1983:75), Weber focused almost entirely on them. Indeed, one of Weber’s main critiques of Marx is that materialist theory fails to adequately characterize social dynamics within the middle class.¹⁸ That Weberian theory fails to adequately characterize the politics of interclass conflict has already been noted, but Weber did make important contributions to our understandings of middle-class cultural life. Foremost among these are his observations concerning middle-class relations to the market and the unstable sociocultural dynamic of status competition within the middle class. Weber’s discussions of consumption and status rivalry provide very useful insights into the dynamics of middle-class cultural practice in Kathmandu.

One of Weber’s key breaks with Marxist or materialist portrayals of class is his observation that the middle class relates to economic or productive processes not primarily as sellers of labor (workers) or owners of capital (the capitalist elite) but as consumers of goods in the market place.¹⁹ In other words, the middle class’s position is determined less directly by its relations to the means of production (selling labor or owning capital) than by its relations to the market, that is, by its ability to consume.²⁰ With its members engaged mainly in tertiary labor—professionals, bureaucrats, teachers, retail entrepreneurs, independent artisans, and the like—the middle class is one step removed from the productive processes of capital. Whereas workers earn wages, and capitalists earn dividends, members of the middle class earn salaries, a term that implies a certain moral distance from mere laboring and mere wealth.²¹ Instead, the middle class stakes its identity on its accomplishments and refinement, moral discourses that it pursues largely through its privileged access to goods and services (from education to fashions) in the free market. Thus, for Weber a group’s middle-classness is a function of its place in the capitalist economy, a sheltered space removed both economically and morally from the vulgarities of production and enacted through the democratic freedoms of the consumer marketplace. Weber’s views on how middle-class morality is related to its position within the larger class economy, and how a rhetoric of morality naturalizes and defends middle-class privilege, provide important insights into middle-class cultural practice in Kathmandu.

Weber’s other key insight into the nature of middle-classness concerns the way in which a range of different cultural formations, lifestyles, and status claims compete within the middle class. Precisely because of their ambiguous relationship to the productive economy (as neither workers nor capitalists), members of the middle class live in a relatively unstable socioeconomic space. This instability is mirrored in the constantly contested, highly materialistic, and anxious character of middle-class lives. Forced to market their skills, services, and accomplishments in the capitalist free market, members of the middle class are those who must constantly promote and justify their self-worth in the face of competing claims in the market. In many ways the middle class could be said to absorb into its own class-cultural practice the antagonisms between labor and capital that have historically been played out between the working and capitalist classes (cf. Miller 1995c:49). The anxieties and contradictions of middle-class life might be understood as reflecting this internalized class conflict within people who are simultaneously sellers of labor and owners of capital (professional, educational, and so on).

It is interesting that Weber’s most detailed discussion of the intensely competitive and anxious nature of middle-class cultural life comes in an account of his visit to the United States, which, he argued, was undergoing a profound transformation toward a much more status-oriented and status-conscious society (1946:311). Writing in the early twentieth century, Weber saw the characteristic form of stratification by ‘status groups’ on the basis of conventional styles of life emerging at the present time in the United States (Weber 1946:188). He stressed how in the United States the neighborhood in which one lived was crucial to claims of belonging to ‘society,’ and above all, how status claims demanded strict submission to the fashion that is dominant at a given time in society, a submission that exists among men in America to a degree unknown in Germany (ibid.). In the same way that strict submission to fashion was a crucial factor in determining one’s employment chances, social intercourse, and marriage arrangements in the United States (according to Weber), so also in the 1990s Kathmandu’s middle-class culture was characterized by intense social pressures to conform to local consumer fashion standards.²²

Running parallel with the powerful forces of emulation in the United States were equally powerful forces of status competition. Weber noted that there were

all sorts of circles setting themselves apart by means of many other characteristics and badges . . . all these elements usurp status honor. The development of status is essentially a question of stratification resting upon usurpation. . . . But the road from this purely conventional situation to legal privilege . . . is easily traveled as soon as a certain stratification of the social order has in fact been lived in and has achieved stability by virtue of a stable distribution of economic power. (1946:188)

Here Weber depicts middle-class life as a space of competing status circles, each trying to usurp ‘status’ honor for its own configuration of characteristics and badges. But Weber also makes it clear that this game of competing status claims is no Cakewalk. For claims to status honor to be more than mere claims, they have to be lived in (or lived out) and converted into legal privilege through a cold and ruthless process of valorization by virtue of. . . economic power. Indeed, it is crucial to see how processes of status emulation (submission to fashion) and status competition are all fundamentally rooted in the vagaries and instabilities of the market place. Middle-class status is as precarious and fleeting as middle-class fashions, and it is the chronic fickleness of the fashion system (Barthes 1983) that perhaps best analogizes the anxious cultural experience of middle-classness. In this book I will argue that the middle class’s relations to the capitalist market and productive processes (a position of instability, ambiguity, vulnerability), its distinct internal sociocultural dynamic (of competing lifestyles and consumer paranoia), and the ways in which these lifestyles naturalize economic privilege (by couching it in a language of honor and morality that excludes its class others) are precisely what make up some of the key generative, or constitutive, cultural dynamics of middle-class practice.

How are we to fit contemporary Nepal into this understanding of middle-class culture, a view derived (via Marx and Weber) from the experiences of people in distant times and places? In one way, this study could be read as a contribution to the larger project of chronicling the global social history of bourgeois culture. Many of the cultural processes of capitalism and class formation that this study depicts have occurred—in the broadest sense—elsewhere before,²³ and continue to unfold around the world. Yet because many of these processes were palpably new to people in Kathmandu in the 1990s, this ethnographic study is able to capture something of the extraordinarily self-conscious awareness of living in an era of transformation, an experience that fosters overt reflection on the meanings of, and contradictions inherent to, processes of development and modernization. Out of these experiences emerge important insights into how modern consumer subjectivities are created, embodied, and naturalized, how forms of capitalist promotion (media and others) constitute desire in webs of cross-referencing mutual publicity, and how new forms of social identification (for example, youth) emerge from processes of class formation and commodification. For comparative purposes, this study provides glimpses of a crucial historical moment in the development of modern capitalist society.

But it is equally clear that this moment in Nepal’s cultural history should by no means be understood as the reliving of someone else’s history, or as the story of Nepal’s catching up with the West. Middle-class life in Kathmandu is in no way merely derivative or, to quote this chapter’s epigraph, less true or real than the Western experience of class. Though middle-class life in Kathmandu shares some of the key sociocultural dynamics that I have identified above, its meaning, experience, and nature are uniquely Nepali. As I show throughout this book, middle-class life in Kathmandu is mediated by local caste logics and other religiously based notions of propriety and suitability that,